Ransome, Ernest Leslie

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Ransome, Ernest Leslie (1852–1917). English engineer, whose father had developed, manufactured, and patented a ‘concrete stone’, a type of reinforced concrete. E. L. Ransome went to the USA in 1869 to exploit this invention, and designed early reinforced-concrete bridges in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA (1886–7). Other designs exploiting reinforced concrete include the Borax factory, Bayonne, NJ (1897—the structure of which survived a huge fire in 1902), and the United Shoe Manufacturing Company's factory, Beverly, near Boston, MA (1903–5). It, several grain-elevators, and Albert Kahn's contemporary Packard factory, Detroit, MI, are among the first fully developed large industrial buildings constructed of reinforced concrete. Ransome's economical exposed frames with glazed panels replacing solid walls served as exemplars for Gropius and Le Corbusier, and thus became paradigms of International Modernist imagery in the 1920s. With the Danish-born Henry Alexis Saurbrey (1886–1967) Ransome published (1912) his influential Reinforced Concrete Buildings.

Bibliography

P. Collins (1959);
Placzek (ed.) (1982);
Ransome & and Saurbrey (1912);
Jane Turner (1996)

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